Posted
by
Soulskillon Sunday May 18, 2014 @05:19AM
from the call-me-when-they're-disposable dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Just when people got used to good smartphones costing $200 with a 2-year contract, they also started to realize that those 2-year contracts were bad news. Still, it's often more palatable than fronting $600 for good, new hardware. But that's starting to change. Cell phone internals are getting cheap enough that prices for capable devices have been creeping downward below $200 without a contract. We ran into something similar with the PC industry some years back — previous-gen chips had no trouble running next-gen software (excluding games with bleeding-edge graphics), and so the impetus to keep getting the latest-and-greatest hardware disappeared for a lot of people. That revolution is underway now for smartphones, and it's going to shake things up for everybody, including Apple and Samsung. But the biggest effects will be felt in the developing world: '[F]or a vast number of people in a vast number of countries, the cheap handset will be the first screen, and the only screen. Their primary interface with the world. A way of connecting to the Internet where there are no telephone lines or coaxial cables or even electricity. In nations without subsidized cell phone contracts or access to consumer credit, the $50-and-you-own-it handset is going to be transformative.'"

Except in places where data is limited to a fault, ie anywhere that isn't urban america and/or some other afluent cities (like London). Same reason why SDCards aren't going to die for android, as much as google might want you to stream your music it just isn't possible and a sub 2gig plan. Even then it's still stupid. So long as there are stupid caps to the level of data that companies will give people nothing like this will take off. Take my plan for example. I live in Australia and all the plans from every comapny around $30AUS a month have about 200-400 MB worht of data. to get anything worth while you have to go up to $60 a month which for a lot of people isn't something they can do. It's similarly shitty in a lot of other countries too

In Africa, you get things like community mesh networks spreading. Especially with recent codecs like Codec2 (hi, Bruce Perens!;-)), you should need even less bandwidth than GSM for reasonable-quality VOIP apps.

You hdo realize that Africa is far from being this homogeneous place where everyone has the same problems?

Yes, but when people talk specifically about Africa, and mention how improved wireless networks would be so beneficial there, as opposed to anywhere else, it wouldn't make sense if they weren't talking specifically about the poorer parts. Otherwise, why are mesh networks more important in Botswana than Uzbekistan (which has a PPP GDP per capita less than 1/4 of Botswana)?

Map makers have messed up the world for years...but years of kids looking at maps,...

I am extremely skeptical of the explanation that "map makers" cause geographical ignorance. I think it is far more likely that people who can't find their own country on the map, simply don't study maps at all, and have no interest in doing so.

That because they use a projection where you can draw straight lines on the map and use it for navigation. Yes this distorts sizes but lets be honest here the reason for the popularity of the Mercator projection is that maps are mostly used for navigation.

If you want to get a real feel for what the world looks like get a globe. I hear they are popular presents for children.

How do you think the rest of the world got so far ahead of these remote african locations?We had all the same problems in the past too, and we overcame them.

The real key is education, to enable people to improve their own conditions... Dishing out medicines and food will just increase the population while doing nothing about the conditions that make even the current population levels unsustainable. It's only making the problem worse, and making the people ever more dependent on foreign aid.

The real key is education, to enable people to improve their own conditions.

Who said anything about not increasing education? Believe it or not, you can educate people pretty well without mesh networks. Surprisingly, most people in the developed world who are at least 30 or 35 managed to do it. There's this great new tech called "books", which are much easier to setup and maintain, and can even run without electricity! Some guy named Gutenberg developed the tech to make them much cheaper, and I think his patents have expired. Absent books you can give people in the poorest parts of

First "someone" isn't enough. It needs to be someone sufficiently educated.

Yes, it's called a virtuous cycle. Educate some people, they can teach more people, etc. It's worked pretty well for thousands of years.

And you need one for about every 30 children or so. And if you are unlucky, all you get out of it is maybe 10 educated people, the others either can't attend, at least not regularly, get too sick, die,...

That was my point about people needing enough to eat and being in good enough health to learn something.

It is incredibly expensive...

Labor rates are pretty cheap there.

simply doesn't scale and as a result in general just does not happen

That must explain why, for example, in colonial America most people were illiterate. Oh, wait, the American colonies were known for having a very high literacy rate, and people from the mother country who came here were amazed at not just the literacy rate, even amongst the poor, but how well read and informed many of them were. And it was done with, wait for this, drum roll... one room school houses. Apparently some of the people who learned there, got a little more education, and then taught in other schools. It was amazing! I forgot to add: they didn't have cell phones or the Internet. Apparently they thought indoor plumbing was a higher priority. Such ignorant fools!

Even in 21st century America cell phones, the Internet, laptops, etc. have done remarkably little to improve education. Do you know that when TV first came along they thought it would be a great educational tool. Long distance classes and so forth may be great at a college level, but do you really think that'll work for a bunch of grade school kids? Maybe when they improve image recognition enough so that it can figure out whether little Bobby in the back needs to go #1 or #2.

I had several of my high-school AP science courses via satellite. They were very, very, very boring. The "teacher" was actually just a coordinator and had almost no grasp of the material. Physics via satellite and chemistry via satellite... ugh. Did I mention the part about how the courses were absolutely, stupefyingly boring?

Not sure how they look on a cell phone screen, but they were both informative on regular TV and laptop screens. I watched both for fun twenty years ago (post college), and also the one on chemistry with my kid a few years back (the physics one was not as engaging though). I liked being able to rewind them to review some complex issue several times. They are not the same as doing hands-on lab e

You really think that most of the progress (at least in Europe) before the 20th century was conditional upon exploiting Africa? Did Watt need rare minerals to construct his steam engine? Did Galileo need African ivory for his telescope handles? Did Newton need African slaves to work their brains off on his arithmetic plantations?

Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.

Right about what? Bill Gates has been one of the main public proponents of the importance of cheap smartphones and cellular networks in the poorest countries. If you don't have reasonably fast and reliable communication technology you can't solve any of the other problems.

For example rail lines and steam engines pretty much solved the communications problem in western Europe and North America in the 19:th century, along with telegraph lines for shorter messages.

Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.

Should be downvoted as downright stupid. If one of the three towns 20 miles footwalk away has the medicine your kid needs and the other two don't, then having a phone to find out which one can save your kid's life. People in Africa use phones to get information about markets so they can go to the right market to buy or sell things. You really can't imagine that people in bad living conditions could use the power of communication supplied by a phone to improve their living conditions?

You really can't imagine that people in bad living conditions could use the power of communication supplied by a phone to improve their living conditions?

This is slashdot you know, the one time technical sit now populated by the most short-sighted asshats on the intertoobz.

Moped Jesus could be handing out free beer and they'd bitch about the brand and the temperature, and how the beer disproves Global warming, and that godammed Jesus is just a hill for the NSA.

People who are way behind in technology should not have some slashdotter declare that they shouldn't have that technology.

Let's say you are a poor farmer in Africa. You might be able to get information on crop planting, as in weather events that might affect your harvest - you want to wait a day or two if a big storm that would wash away your planting was going to happen.

With only a little imagination, it becomes obvious that smartphones will be a very positive effect in poor people's lives.

Let's say you are a poor farmer in Africa. You might be able to get information on crop planting...

Right. One of the biggest problems in teaching people better farming techniques is that they are loathe to try anything different. It's not so ridiculous because one bad crop can mean starving, so they're very conservative. You think they're going to say, wow, what a great idea I got from the Internet! Even agricultural agents don't cut it. The best approach is to find one adventuresome farmer (or guarantee to make up for it if his crop fails) and let other people see how it works. If they notice that Charl

People in Africa use phones to get information about markets so they can go to the right market to buy or sell things.

And they'll be able to get the latest stock quotes too. People know where to go to buy and sell things, just like they did for millenia before cell phones. What people in poor parts of rural Africa lack is a decent way to get their products to market. Ugandan honey sells for a premium (something about a smoky flavor and countries w/ honey connoisseurs) but how does a Ugandan apiarist get his product to market? Roads and maybe even trucks would be good - no cell phones or Internet required. It worked to solv

The "dark ages"? Nobody who knows anything about history has used that absurd term in at least 50 years. It referred to the early middle ages, roughly 500-100 A.D. If you're referring to the Black Death, that happened about 350 years later. And as to your notion that trade so improved Europe, trade was precisely what caused that epidemic. Italian traders brought it over from the Black Sea, and additional trade spread it throughout Europe. Exception: Poland, because they were smart enough to cut of all trade when it happened, and had very few deaths as a result.

You know what changed the future of Europe? Trade

Long distance trade, that brought spices and silks to the rich, and the plague to Europe? Or are you talking about the post-Columbus trade with the Americas, which brought metals of no practical value to the rich, caused rampant inflation as a result instead of any material benefit, and resulted in up to 90% of the Amerindian population dying from Old World diseases.

the printing press

Hmm, maybe that explains my advocacy of books.

not changes in political systems

You mean the changes in the British political system that allowed for competitive markets, which was a key factor in the Industrial Revolution? The thing that lifted the majority of people out of the poverty that they'd been living in for many centuries was the Industrial Revolution, and its necessary precursors, like the British Agricultural Revolution, and less heralded things like 17th-18th century improvements in smelting metals.

The "dark ages"? Nobody who knows anything about history has used that absurd term in at least 50 years. It referred to the early middle ages, roughly 500-100 A.D. If you're referring to the Black Death, that happened about 350 years later.

Well, there was a plague period in Europe between 541 CE and about 750 CE. But that doesn't absolve him from that nonsense he wrote because he didn't know about that anyway.;-)

It wasn't all that short. The greatest factor diminishing life expectancy was infant mortality. People generally fail to account for that when they are contemplating about medieval life. Then they falsely imagine that people dropped dead upon turning thirty or something like that.

You know what changed the future of Europe? Trade (and associated increase in knowledge from the Arab world) and the printing press.

The knowledge historically received from the Arab world is comparatively minuscule. For example, virtually all of the medical knowledge of Galen and Avicenna was a rotting building that needed to be torn down post-Renaissance, and

You hit the nail on the head. In a way, it is a razor and blade school of marketing. The phones are cheap, but if you want to use any data with it, you will be paying upwards of a C-note a month, regardless of using T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, CREDO, Millenicom, or the other MVNOs. It used to be that there were unlimited data plans, but the tier 1 providers dropped the hammer on the MVNOs to disallow it.

Google seems to have good intentions with wanting to get rid of the SD card, but realisticall

Voice calls are very cheap and reasonable in many developing countries such that it isn't really an issue. In my experience the connection quality is usually too low for an adequate VOIP service, but this may change with the new generation of mobile internet.

My perception is that telcos in developed markets are finding it more lucrative to milk whatever they can from legacy customers still ready to pay high prices for voice service than invest and develop new technologies and services.

I'm sitting in front of my $2500 laptop while a $50 TV stick smoothly plays Netflix on my bedroom TV. This "TV stick" is a fully functioning Android computer [amazon.com] with all that implies. This is the "desktop equivalent" to the laptop, which in this case is a mobile phone device.

My point is that what "is a computer" is so cheap that the market is about to be tripped, completely. My phone now represents the majority of my interaction with the Internet in a personal context, and I do Internet development professiona

I imagine even the Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy faded away if you took it 'out of range.'

I got the sense that in Adams's vision of "The Guide" all the data was locally cached.

Adams thought of "The Guide" as a set of encyclopaedias in a small device rather than a client for a server. This is why the Guide was always compared to Encyclopaedia Galactica which is a play on words for Encyclopaedia Britannica (which before the intertubes was a popular brand of encyclopaedia in British English nations).

I would not be surprised in the least to find voice over internet protocol (VOIP) completely taking over once everyone has access to this technology.

There is nothing about VoIP that's inherently cheaper than straight digitized voice streams. VoIP eats up more bandwidth (all the headers and stuff), and RF bandwidth is the most precious commodity there is in wireless. They've done a great job w/ better modulation and coding techniques, but Shannon and Nyquist are still right. Getting more RF bandwidth is great too, but there are still limits. Maybe someday we'll use mm wave for cell phones, but we're a long way from that.

VoIP makes sense for fixed point connections where umpteen zigabit/sec (or whatever they're up to this week) makes bandwidth extremely cheap, but otherwise it sucks. And I haven't even mentioned latency requirements yet.

Most of the carriers use VoIP internally now anyway - the entire BT backbone in the UK has been VoIP for a long time. The difference between VoIP over the phone company's phone plan and over their data plan is the QoS. It is inherently cheaper to send data when you don't have latency and jitter guarantees, because you need to reserve spectrum for the duration of the call to be able to guarantee meeting the maximum jitter requirement, and if you miss it then people complain. For VoIP over a data plan, peo

Wifi distance is a relative term. With highly directional antennas, that distance can be miles, even without exceeding EIRP restrictions.

You can use up to 52dBm EIRP, but by FCC rules you can only do that w/ a 30dBi antenna. That's very directional, like the kind of stuff that's used for carefully aimed terrestrial microwave links. That's hardly suited for mobile. Cellular mobiles, as opposed to the base stations, generally use omni's, or at least very low gain. MIMO can buy you a little, but it's not magic. Admittedly 52dBm EIRP is an extreme (the tradeoffs are here [afar.net]), but you still have the same basic EIRP vs. directionality issue. The coff

I read it as "FCC or foreign counterparts". I'd like to see concrete examples of relevant differences in radio communication regulations between the United States and the subsaharan countries in question.

I use VOIP sometimes but have often had to drop my calls and go back to the standard phone network because the quality was so poor. Maybe other ISPs or VOIP providers would be better - but it's a bit of a crapshoot. It's certainly not good enough to abandon conventional phones entirely.

Sure, lots of carriers will give you unlimited voice and text for something like $30-40/month (or more)... but that's with only a little scrap of data. If you want unlimited voice and a reasonable amount of data (say, 2GB of 4G) then you're talking about $60+/month.

...Unless, of course, you realize that you can use VoIP and therefore don't need the unlimited voice. In that case, you can get a T-mobile plan for $30/month that gives you 5GB of 4G data but only 100 voice minutes (that you won't use anyway beca

Who needs a cellphone carrier? So you think that its 'magic' that your phone has data as you drive around? You seem to not understand that many carriers these days have data caps, but not voice caps. ( all will follow if more people use more data.. ).

"but i have wifi" , ok where is that coming from? Another carrier that will cap your use. And how do you expect to get that WiFi once you leave your home? Idiot.

You cant beat the people that control your connection. They make the rules. You will take it, and a

Imagine trying to call someone over VOIP on WiFi, while walking down the street, or sitting on a bus.Every time you switch access points your connection will die, you'll be given a new IP address behind a different NAT going through a different ISP.There will also be a few seconds where you have no connectivity while your device times out because you went out of range of

I tried one of those Chinese smartphones. Absolute pile of crap - technically it worked but it was so slow and frustrating that trying to use it was an utter chore. My Nexus 5 cost three times as much but is easily worth it.

Agree on the contracts though - my monthly bill on Three PAYG is about £5-10.

Fortunately Lenovo bought what was left of Motorola Comm., and the Moto X is pretty damn good. Lenovo will probably announce that they'll keep the engineering and manufacturing in the US, because the Chinese stuff is crap. Meanwhile "American" companies will ship everything to China.

I just (well, a couple of months ago) got a Moto G, which is aimed at developing markets. It uses the Cortex A7, which is ARM's low-power application processor (in-order, dual-issue if you're lucky), but has four of them so I've not yet found anything where it doesn't feel fast. It's definitely a step up from my old phone with a single-core Cortex-A8 (similar performance to the A7, but at a higher power budget). £15/month seems excessive. With Three, I pay 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB of dat

While I can't comment on the third world in general, I saw a lot of solar cell setups for charging cell phones in South Sudan - people even ran solar charging as a business; a solar panel, some car batteries, a black box of electronics and 3 to 5 South Sudanese pound for a full charge.
Also saw plenty of cell towers with solar panels and battery banks, with diesel generators for backup. Not as clean or tidy as plugging into the grid, granted... but it works. Was a life line for me for a year spent down there, and twice so for the people who lives their whole life there.
Just because you can't plug something into a national grid, don't mean you can't get power... often cheaper and more reliable than the grid too - at least in Juba.

Right, so, electricity. It doesn't stop being electricity when it comes from solar panels or diesel generators, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Clearly, they were getting carried away suggesting you'll be able to connect to the internet without any electricity.

Running a vehicle just to charge a cell phone is _grossly_ inefficient, and expensive. A local generator charging batteries is more efficient. But why pay for gasoline, and maintaining a motor, or even pay for grid electricity, when a modest solar charger can pay for itself in a month?

A solar charger can pay for itself in a month in a country not dependent on electricity? I live in the country with the world's highest electricity prices and the payback period on solar for a whole house is in the order of 5 years.

To think that a small panel would pay for itself unless it was run as some part of a business is ludicrous. On the flip side gasoline is very bloody cheap in Africa compared to most of the western world, and many people have cars already.

That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology. They are now so ubiquitous that there's little point spending a fortune for something that can do the same, but "slightly faster" or with more megapixels, or whatever.

Sure, there are evolutions, and merges of technology, and lots of new developments still to come but if the phones don't have something new, then they are all just the same as each other, give or take a few statistics here or there.

Smartphones beat out ordinary mobile phones, that's for sure, but it was a long while coming. Tablets are in the same place at the moment - they are powerful enough to run almost anything and so there's little to distinguish them except for company name and some random technical specifications.

Welcome to the era of ubiquitous computing, where my mobile phone can plot a course across Europe, suck down traffic data and tell people on Facebook when I'm going to arrive quicker than I could do it myself on a full PC. While also handling all my calls, monitoring my car engine, checking my Exchange accounts, etc.

The problem we have now is not pricing - the cost of something going down is rarely a problem for the consumers or the manufacturers and their suppliers. The problem we have now is what comes next? We all have Turing-capable machines that run at stupendous speeds, and most of us actually have several. The question is how do you design your services to take account of this - TV streaming, etc. is still in its infancy and pretty much in denial at the moment.

You're absolutely right, but in addition to that the cellphone business (smart or dumb) has always been a crazy business to be in, even crazier than PC/laptop's. There it was about price, so the change was always slower and smoother (might take 5 years to be put out of business).

The cellphone biz is insane. Remember when Nokia was king of the hill? Blackberry, Motorola, etc., etc. It's probably better business to be a component supplier. The margins may get thin as the prices go down, but it's all about performance and price. Chip sets (the RF/DSP stuff, not ARM's), displays, etc.

Electronics: the only business where prices go down.

I wish there were more like it. They keep telling us that inflation is low because smart phones are getting cheaper, and a pair of socks is $0.05 cheaper because they're now made in a country where people earn $2/day instead of $3. Never mind that nobody can afford medical insurance (yes, before Obamacare too, w/ double-digit inflation), and going to college (let alone grad school) means mortgaging your children's children.

Here's one for you who complain about old fart stories. Between a partial scholarship, federal grants (yes grants, not loans, and my family was working class, not poor) and employer tuition payments (100% if you got a 'B' or better), I got my BSEE and MSEE without paying a cent in tuition. I'm not gloating, because it was not because of anything brilliant that I did. I wish we still had it because my kids are approaching college age. But inflation is low!

Reagan set the stage. Clinton triangulated the Democrats and aligned himself with the Republicans. Though the Democrats love the "Big Dog", he was the one who decimated welfare as we knew it, killed Glass-Stegal, exempted derivatives from regulations, and permitted regulator shopping among the financial institutions. 100 billion dollar insurance companies register themselves as thrifts to escape oversight, for example. All through the 90s there was systemic wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to the top 20%

That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology.

I think some people will, there seems to be a lot of opportunity for improvements in technology and platform-specific development even if cheap phones seem good enough for some specific set of circumstances.

I have a 5", quad core, 2GB RAM, 32GB Flash smart phone from Chinavasion [chinavasion.com]. It is much like a Samsung S4, and cost US$250. Unlocked as a standard feature, and with dual SIM, Took five days to from order to doorstep. Plugged in my work SIM and my own SIM and gave back a my work's S3.

The Chinese don't give a crap what the vast majority of Americans say or do. They won't likely decide I support the 'wrong' candidate for president or that I have a 'bad attitude' about some law or another here.

In the US anyway, Google/Motorola has been raising the bar on what's possible with inexpensive smartphones. I have a Moto G targeted to the Boost no-contract plan for which I paid $80, out the door. It has a decent (if non-removable) battery, excellent screen of a decent size, runs KitKat/Dual-Core/1GB RAM, and is even waterproof (plenty of YouTube videos showing the phone functioning in a bowl of water.) The next version (coming out soon) will add a much-needed MicroSD slot and LTE. The only significant con is the camera, which is pretty mediocre (but what do you expect for that price?)

The CDMA one I bought was easily flashed over to PagePlus/Verizon (Boost inexplicably did not request Moto permanently lock the bootloader; you can obtain a bootloader unlock code for free from Moto.) The GSM version is sold unlocked directly by Google for all of $180; the 4G will be $220.

And they just announced the Moto E; a slightly lower-spec phone for only a puny $130.

There's rampant speculation if Lenovo will continue this trend of well-spec'd cheap phones. The consensus seems to be no, given how Lenovo actually wants to make money on the purchase, and nobody thinks Google has any kind of usable margin on these superb value-priced phones.

The Moto G is actually a quad-core. I have a Nexus 4, but I envy Moto G owners mostly because the phone is undistinguishably speedy, its battery lasts longer and it's unbelievably cheaper. Lenovo would be crazy not to continue the trend, because what Moto needs now is market and mind share. They attempted to make good phones with good margins (I'm thinking of the RAZRs) and they were doing way, way worse than with the Moto G/E.

And what Google did with Moto was so simple it's laughable. Just remove the cruft (stop wasting resources with kevlar backs or MotoBlur), simplify and optimize the software and you can actually surpass the competition while using cheaper components. They could sell the Moto G for $300 and it would still be a good value if you compared it with the competition. LG's G2 Mini is pretty much the same phone, but priced at $400.

I bought a Moto G because I wanted to test it out before giving it to my brother and upgrading to a "proper" phone, the N5. At this point my brother might be getting my current Moto G but only if I decide to get the 4G version... It does absolutely everything I need and does it well. Damn shame Google sold Motorola - why do they make it so hard for me to give them money?!?

it's talking about 200 dollar unsubbed smartphones.which have been a reality for 10 or so years...

but now it's nearing the point where you can't even tell the difference without running a benchmark software. you can already get dualcore phones for under 100 bucks. unsubbed. it will play youtube, spotify, angry birds, whatever.

Transformative? Every time some semi alcoholic blogging 'communications major' from Vassar or some such place wanders into the mall and discovers that last year's models can be had, from a third party kiosk for near-free they immediately whip out their own brand new iPhone to proclaim a Golden Age is Upon Us.

Cheap smartphones have been around for years and years you retard. The problem is the NETWORK.

There's also a good chance of you finding a better job with a new company that doesn't have a monopsony over hiring.

Or it could cause your company to have to develop new innovative products, which could be very good for you.

See, the thing is, if you're going to buy into the notion of a consumer-based, "free market" economy, you've got to see this kind of "creative destruction" as a positive. Personally, I see it all as a big dodge designed to redistribute wealth upwards, but that's a different discussion.

I used to be one of those people who had to have the latest flagship phone on a 2 year plan. Then I wised up, realized I could buy a $200 phone with a quad core cpu and plenty of storage via removable SD card, and pay $50 a month for service. My current moto android running kit kat is every bit as good as the latest iOS device and Samsung flagship, and I paid half the price.
I think we are about to see a huge drop in price as more people come to the realization that many of the features on flagship phone

...or some other cryptocurrency. As these low-cost screens come on in the developing world, those users will want access to the modern, internationally-capable fee-free (very nearly) monetary system represented by cryptocurrencies. This may make 1st-world debate about the good or evil of bitcoin (and its ilk) largely irrelevant.

Lets get real. A $200 phone in a contract is a ripoff. By the time you have finished the contact, in reality you might have paid for your phone between $1000 to $2000. Better buy a new one without a fixed contract and use it with a cheap operator/plan.

I wish. I Belgium it is law that you sellunblocked phones and also phones without a contract. It used to be forbidden that you sell them as one, untill a minister wanted to buy an iPhone and heb was not able to because they were not sold in Belgium

So he changed the law.

The companies wanted to sell them as a bundle, because they knew they would be making more money and not because Samsung, Nokia or any other company would lower the prices. It was because people would pay more.

Where people are still dumb enough to buy phones on contract. Every other country, civilized or not, the people pay for the phone and buy the service they need

This is a symptom of the credit addiction prevalent in the US and becoming a serious problem in my own nation, Australia.

Rather than paying with their own money which may mean *gasp* saving up for what you want, they get everything on credit and pay for it over time which means creditors can add extra charges, interest and gives the purchaser less negotiating power with the merchant. However it satisfies the "I want it now, daddy, I want it Nooooooooww" crowd who are not only oblivious to the long term c

Without cellphones, how will they make enough money to organise clean water and buy sanitation?

WIth a cellphone you can find out how to (profitably) make "pure water" (Google is your friend). West Africa is extremely capitalist: you have to do it yourself. The starving millions are starving through lack of cellphones - they are an essential business tool: people with cellphones are not starving.